On Language; Playing in Pretoria

By William Safire

Published: September 29, 1985

SPEAKER THOMAS P. O'Neill Jr. did not like the way President Reagan took away the House's thunder at the Government of South Africa. Congress was readying a bill to apply sanctions; the President, to head off Congressional seizure of the setting of foreign policy, announced his intention to put forth a series of sanctions by executive order.

''It will be seen for what it is,'' grumbled the Speaker, ''by the people suffering under the yoke of that Government.'' His point was that the slightly less onerous restrictions would be taken lightly by apostles of apartheid. The Speaker let loose his scorn in a searing phrase: ''This package will play in Pretoria.''

That was a deft shot. The phrase play in Pretoria is a play on play in Peoria, substituting the capital of South Africa for the city with a similar name in Illinois. I had not heard that Nixonian phrase for many years, and can cite chapter and verse on its coinage.

John D. Ehrlichman, who in 1968 was the chief of Nixon advance men, used the phrase to mean ''go over well in a non-elitist environment'' in a ''school'' he ran for the organizers of parades, hoopla and local welcome in cities to be visited by the candidate. ''Play in Peoria appeared in a Wall Street Journal story after I'd run the school in New York and used the expression there,'' recalled Ehrlichman years later. Why Peoria? ''Onomatopoeia was the only reason, I suppose. And it personified - exemplified - a place, removed from the media centers on the coasts, where the national verdict is cast, according to Nixon doctrine.'' (I think John meant alliteration, the repetition of an initial sound; onomatopoeia means ''imitative, echoic,'' like tinkle for the sound of glass touching glass. I run this school for advance phrase-coiners, of which Mr. Ehrlichman is a star student: he also contributed twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.) The word most frequently applied by Mr. Reagan to apartheid is repugnant; whenever asked about that racial policy, the President almost always uses that adjective, although usually in a subordinate clause. That word is rooted in the Latin for ''to fight back,'' and its most frequent meaning is ''objectionable, distasteful.'' Other synonyms available are offensive, loathsome, repulsive.

Sanction is a word that appears to go in opposite directions. As a verb, to sanction means ''to permit, ratify, approve, validate,'' but as a noun, a sanction is a penalty or method of coercion. What gives? The word comes from the Latin sanctus, past participle of ''to make holy,'' and it is the root of such words as sanctuary and sanctimonious. It began as an ecclesiastical decree, and the meaning split early: the verb implied approval, but the noun came to be associated with the threat contained if the church's order was not followed. In law and ethics, sanctions could be positive as well as negative - ''inducements'' as well as ''coercions'' - but in international relations, the word came to mean only the penalties threatened or carried out to force a course of action. That's the context of most usages of the noun now: a sanction implies a good type of pressure, but pressure, threats, coercion and penalties connote imperialist bullying.

While we're at it, Pretoria is a city named after Andries W. J. Pretorius, the Boer leader who defeated the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838. His name was probably rooted in praetor, an ancient Roman magistrate, a rank below a consul, leading to the phrase Praetorian guard, the soldiers protecting a Roman emperor. (Peoria, north of Springfield in central Illinois, comes from Piwarea, an Algonquian Indian word that perhaps means ''he comes bearing a pack on his back.'') I have always found it curious that my Nixon colleagues chose Peoria as the epitome of squareness, because I heard Everett M. Dirksen, who in 1969 was the Senate minority leader, use the name in a wholly different sense. ''I was born in Pekin, Ill.,'' he recalled, ''a lovely town, kind of on the quiet side. But for those young rakes who wanted excitement - not too far away were the bright lights of Peoria.'' Hot to Redact YOU DON'T GET A CALL from the assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice unless you are in heavy water or deep trouble. When this division's chief is on the phone, the person on the other end usually trembles. For that reason, every couple of years I like to call whoever is in the job to give him a hard time.

Stephen Trott is the man who strikes terror into criminal hearts these days, so he was the recipient of my query: why had he not cooperated with the House Judiciary Subcommittee investigating the E.F. Hutton affair? With a smooth asperity, he replied, ''We've been redacting thousands of pages of documents for a month.''

Redacting? I remembered, years ago, receiving mail from Daniel Morgaine, a journalist in Paris, with the letterhead title ''Redacteur en chef,'' which I assumed meant ''editor in chief.'' Although its written use dates to the 15th century, this was the first I had heard the word redact as an English verb.

''It means to purge it of 6-e stuff,'' explained Mr. Trott. Translated from prosecutorialese, that means he was removing the material that Rule 6 (e) of Title 18 of the United States Code requires be kept secret, as part of grand-jury proceedings.

Redact is a good verb that deserves wider use. It means ''make suitable for presentation,'' from the Latin word for ''reduce.'' Redact is more precise in its legal connotation of removing that which is unsuitable than edit, more purposeful than shorten or compress, more formal than boil down. Also, if you are snipping something embarrassing out of a document, it is a fine euphemism for censoring. Try it, next time you have to pass along some information: one man's redact is another man's sanitize. Wave Bye-Bye THE NEW YORK TIMES financial page headline: '' 'New Wave' View of Protectionism.'' The story dealt with an iconoclastic band of economists who contend that protectionism - a word always used pejoratively -may not always be such a bad thing. ''Dubbed 'new wave,' '' wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, the reporter, ''these findings erode the textbook notion that unrestricted trade is always the best solution.''

Meanwhile, in her new book, indispensable to corporate clods, ''Letitia Baldridge's Complete Guide to Executive Manners,'' the sensible etiquettist titles a chapter on teleconferencing: ''The Electronic Meeting: The New Wave.''

It's the same old new wave. The phrase is from the French nouvelle vague, a term coined in the late 1950's to describe film (formerly movie) directors whose work was intimately self-conscious and helped to make the director, or auteur, more of a star. After that was translated into English, New Wave - usually capitalized - was tacked on to any ''different'' approach to anything. Before the economists moved in (O Smoot! O Hawley!), the phrase was applied most often to a sophisticated form of punk-rock music, put forward by groups like the Stranglers.

The predecessor phrase may have been wave of the future, a title of a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, widely taken to be an apologia for Fascism; Harold Ickes, then Interior Secretary, promptly denounced ''the wavers of the future.''

I've had it with new wave, except as a hairdressing idea, such as the current mousse call. Let's try neo-wave next time, if we can't say plain old new.